Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a Hedge Fund

Authors: Hardie, Iain; MacKenzie, Donald

Source: The Sociological Review, Volume 55, Number 1, February 2007 , pp. 57-80(24)

Buy & download fulltext article:

Price: $48.00 plus tax (Refund Policy)

Abstract:

Michel Callon has conceptualised economic actors as made up of socio-technical agencements: collectives of human beings, technical devices, algorithms, and so on. This article reports a pilot, partially observational study of a hedge fund, a category of actor in financial markets that is of growing importance but that has so far attracted little attention in economic sociology. It draws on that study, and on interviews with other financial market practitioners, to delineate what is involved in viewing such an actor as made up of an agencement, and discusses the merits of doing so.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00682.x

Affiliations: 1: University of Edinburgh

Publication date: 2007-02-01